REFORMATION OF SOCIAL OBSERVANCES. 109 



tem induces fashionable extravagance, with its entailed 

 bankruptcy and ruin — when we mark how greatly it limits 

 the amount of social intercourse among the less wealthy 

 classes — ^when we find that many who most need to be dis- 

 cij^lined by mixing with the refined are driven away by it, 

 and led into dangerous and often fatal courses — when we 

 count up the many minor evils it inflicts, the extra work 

 which its costliness entails on all professional and mercan- 

 tile men, the damage to public taste in dress and decora- 

 tion by the setting up of its absurdities as standards for 

 imitation, the injury to health indicated in the faces of its 

 devotees at the close of the London season, the mortality 

 of milliners and the like, which its sudden exigencies yearly 

 involve ; — and when to all these we add -its fatal sin, that it 

 blights, withers up, and kills, that high enjoyment it pro- 

 fessedly ministers to — that enjoyment which is a chief end 

 of our hard struggling in life to obtain — shall we not con- 

 clude that to reform our system of etiquette and fashion, is 

 an aim yielding to few in urgency ? 



There needs, then, a protestantism in social usages. 

 Forms that have ceased to facilitate and have become ob- 

 structive — whether political, religious, or other — have ever 

 to be swept away ; and eventually are so swept away in all 

 cases. Signs are not wanting that some change is at hand. 

 A host of satirists, led on by Thackeray, have been for years 

 engaged in bringing our sham-festivities, and our fashiona- 

 ble follies, into contemj^t ; and in their candid moods, most 

 men laugh at the frivolities with which they and the world 

 in general are deluded. Ridicule has always been a revo- 

 lutionary agent. That which is habitually assailed with 

 sneers and sarcasms cannot long survive. Institutions that 

 have lost their roots in men's respect and faith are doomed; 

 and the day of their dissolution is not far off. The time is 

 approaching, then, when our system of social observances 



